The Avengers – What Captain America Would Lament About Modern Society

Firt up, great kudos to director Joss Whedon on a job well done – full of action, true to the characters, plenty of genuinely funny moments and quips, and without letting it end up overly focused on one character at the expense of others the way the Wolverine & His Backdrop Friends (aka the X-Men movies) did – credit to his comic nerditude and experience with ensemble casts (tip via AoSHQ)

One of the best scenes that I wrote was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present. And I was the one who was like, ‘Guys, we need to lose this.’ It was killing the rhythm of the thing. And we did have a lot of Cap, because he really was the in for me. I really do feel a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things. I was spending a lot of time having him say it, and then I cut that.

Let’s be realistic here… Would the average 1940s American WASP be more shocked by the loss of health care and welfare (things which were nowhere near as prevalent in that era compared to today – even FDR himself opposed welfare parasitism)?

Or would he rather be more shocked at the unprecedented influx of blasphemy, irreverence, cussing, faithlessness, anti-Christianity, and clamping down on public displays of religion?

Or the celebration of public disorder, breaking the law, violence, disrespect, laziness, and collusion with openly-acknowledged enemies of America ala the Occupy movement and modern liberalism in general?

Or the open acceptance (and even praise) of sexual mores like open homosexuality, casual sex, swinging, children by multiple fathers, single motherhood, children out of wedlock, divorce, serial remarriage, and a hundred thousand abortions a month nationally?

Shouldn’t be hard to imagine really, as so much inspiration was already taken from the Ultimates line, the script team was surely aware of Ultimate Cap’s culture shock reaction to the above:

There’s only one God ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.

In reference to Thor and Loki being Asgardian ‘gods’. Cap here seems to get that even if Thor really is a nigh-immortal Asgardian superhuman with control of lightning, that doesn’t mean that the Biblical God is disproven. Thor is merely an alien being identified with the Nordic legends.

This is a point that Ultimate Cap didn’t seem to get (or rather, the writers didn’t want to concede) – Ultimate Thor niggled him that it shouldn’t be a stretch to imagine since Cap goes to church every Sunday. Actually, if Cap really follows what is taught in church, it would preclude Thor’s claims to deity, rather than bolster them.